Reservation Dogs star Devery Jacobs slammed the portrayal of indigenous people in the new Martin Scorsese film, Killers of the Flower Moon.
The movie — starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone — is based on the 2017 book of the same name by David Grann. The plot centers on a series of Oklahoma murders in the Osage Nation during the 1920s.
“This film was painful, grueling, unrelenting and unnecessarily graphic,” Jacobs, 30, wrote via X (formerly known as Twitter) on Monday, October 23.
The indigenous Canadian actress continued: “Being Native, watching this movie was f–king hellfire. Imagine the worst atrocities committed against yr ancestors, then having to sit thru a movie explicitly filled w/ them, w/ the only respite being 30 min long scenes of murderous white guys talking about/planning the killings.”
Killers of the Flower Moon tells the true story of how the Osage were forced from their homelands and relocated to a reservation in present-day Oklahoma. They discovered vast oil deposits beneath their new land, which made them the targets of a murder plot.
Jacobs also complained that the Osage characters were “painfully underwritten,” in contrast to white men who were “given way more courtesy and depth.”
She added, “I don’t feel that these very real people were shown honor or dignity in the horrific portrayal of their deaths. Contrarily, I believe that by showing more murdered Native women on screen, it normalizes the violence committed against us and further dehumanizes our people.”
JaNae Collins, Lily Gladstone, Cara Jade Myers and Jillian Dion in “Killers of the Flower Moon” Apple Studios
Former Osage Nation Chief Jim Gray does not share Jacobs’ criticism of the film, although he admitted he was skeptical at first.
“I was worried we were going to get exploited again — not so much in losing resources and our land, but in the telling of the story of how we lost our resources and land,” Gray told CNN earlier this month.
Gray is the great-grandson of Henry Roan, an Osage man whose killing led federal authorities to discover the plot to murder members of the Osage nation. He met with Scorsese and urged him to create a unique movie
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“I was worried we were going to get exploited again — not so much in losing resources and our land, but in the telling of the story of how we lost our resources and land,” Gray told CNN earlier this month.
Gray is the great-grandson of Henry Roan, an Osage man whose killing led federal authorities to discover the plot to murder members of the Osage nation. He met with Scorsese and urged him to create a unique movie.
“Be the director to make a film that this industry hasn’t seen. The one that they’re going to look at and say, ‘That’s the one we got right,’” Gray told the famed filmmaker.
Scorsese turned to members of the Osage nation for guidance, including Chad Renfro, who served as the tribe’s ambassador for the film and was a consulting producer on the project.
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“It’s not every day that a small Native nation gets this platform,” Renfro told CNN. “This is a horrific story and it is something that is really hard for us to watch. But it is thrilling to say the least to see it come to life in such a way.”
Renfro believes that the Osage input into the film can set a precedent for future projects.
Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in “Killers of the Flower Moon” Apple Studios
“It is setting the bar really high for things like this going forward,” he added. “I hope that it will encourage Hollywood and anybody who’s considering making films about other cultures, period, to do the same.”
Over the past weekend, Killers of the Flower Moon earned $23.3 million at the box office, finishing second to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour film, which grossed $33.2 million, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
